


five people bucky barnes never was.

by rhllors



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Character Study, Implied Relationships, Multi, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-20 11:14:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1508453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhllors/pseuds/rhllors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five lives that never came to pass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	five people bucky barnes never was.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dance_at_bougival](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dance_at_bougival/gifts).



> for malinna, it's a special day. you're my favourite asshole, and i will never rescind that invitation to buckingham palace.
> 
> trigger warnings: medical experimentation (nothing too explicit), murder, brainwashing. feel free to say if you think i need to add anything.

i. **it's not the storm that makes the ocean dangerous.**

"Bucky?" asks Steve Rogers, eye wide and disbelieving that fate could ever deal him a hand so cruel, after everything else. "Bucky? Oh my god--you're _alive_ \--"

Bucky Barnes snarls; all teeth and no remorse, his mouth looks like it's ripping his face in two.

"You didn't look for me." he throws back and Steve's eyes widen, almost comically, like he's been stabbed.

Then Bucky stabs him.

 

 

 

ii. **i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)**

Bucky clings onto the rail, but his hands are slipping, he's going to fall--they're hurtling over Austria (or is it Switzerland? Someone probably told him, but he's been too busy trying to keep Steve alive, stay alive himself, to think about petty things like borders and names) and the valley below them is a very long way down. He's sweating even though he thinks he's probably got hypothermia, the adrenaline from the gun battle is wearing away rapidly, leaving nothing but paralysing fear that he's _going to fall_.

Bucky Barnes doesn't want to die here, in goddamned Europe, falling off a goddamned train for a stupid goddamned German scientist. He used to think he'd die on the streets of New York, with that heady polluted air and a sky made of diamonds, or doing something valiant, like saving Steve.

(Funny how saving Steve used to be punching punks in back alleys, but now it means a rifle slung over his shoulder, a pistol on his side and his trusty knuckle dusters wrapped around his fingers.)

He still has shit to do, he thinks, as his mouth babbles out Steve's name over and over again whilst his hands slip--slip--slip--

He's reaching out, hand outstretched, fingertips brushing, he's going to die, oh god, he thinks, but keeps his eyes open because if James Barnes is gonna die, he's gonna make sure the last thing he sees on this fucked up earth is Steve Rogers, in all his glory.

Bucky's reaching and falling, the pipe gives a godawful creak before.

Before Steve grabs his hand and pulls him back upwards with the strength of a colossus and an inhuman roar. Their tears have frozen on their cheeks, Bucky feels like he actually fell of the goddamned train, but they're alive.

Alive.

 

 

 

iii. **maybe i'm meant for the sea**.

 _32557_.

The room is cold and dark, of that he's vaguely aware of.

There's a window somewhere, he thinks, maybe.

What did the sun look like, again?

 _Sergeant_. 

A needle slides into his arm.

He doesn't even grimace anymore, the sharp scratch is a familiar pain.

In a previous life, that used to mean health.

He tries to imagine the feeling of sunlight of his face; the heat, the warmth.

 _Barnes, James Buchanan_.

Zola is talking to him, but he barely listens. He feels like he's underwater.

In the fall, that was when he enjoyed the sun the most. Hazy sunshine through red leaves hanging onto the trees before they drifted downwards, a gradual descent. The breeze would lick his hair, make his face refreshingly cool.

 _32557\. Sergeant. Barnes, James Buchanan_.

There's another needle, and another.

This time its hot, blazing through his veins like its set them fire.

Bucky drifts further underwater, and hopes he never resurfaces. He just thinks of the cool sunshine of New York City in October and drifts away.

 

(Zola tuts. That's the third one this week.)

 

 

 

iv. **fallaces sunt rerum species et hominum spes fallunt**.

Natalia Romanova is the most dangerous woman alive: she knows this, everyone whose ever met her picks up on it. 

She's been working for the Red Room since before many of her contemporaries were born--you wouldn't think that, looking at the pale skin of her neck, the whisper of a curl in her revolutionary red hair--an ideologue, perhaps, a soldier, most certainly, a Black Widow, always. She entered the programme a girl, and emerged as a wolf, teeth hungry and sharp for whatever was placed in her way.

She is their most deadly, most efficient--that is, of course, apart from _him_. No one is as brilliant at killing as he is.

She wouldn't say she knows him, per say, mainly because every time they complete a mission together (sometimes sharing a victorious, blood-driven fuck), they wipe him afterwards. Petrovitch made her watch once, an implicit threat as he stood behind her on the other side of the glass.

Natalia watched him bite down hard on the plastic they shove into his mouth--because, Petrovitch helpfully adds, he'd bitten through his tongue the first couple of times and that makes life difficult when he wakes up--and lie back into the chair. His face betrays nothing but an acceptance of what is going to happen. The sound is loud, exceptionally loud, and paired with his grunting, eyes screaming in pain, it's difficult to watch, even for the most hardened killer, like herself.

When he wakes, she knows, he will only remember enough. He will know he is the Winter Soldier, that there is a target to kill. He will remember Russia, he will remember this lab. He will return because that's what he's commanded to do, even though this pain brings him nothing but pain. Natalia knows he is a weapon, and that weapons are nothing when doing anything but being pointed in the direction of a target--the Winter Soldier only knows targets.

It is 1986. Their target is Olaf Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden. He will be walking home from the cinema with his wife, and the Winter Soldier will put a bullet in him. Natalia didn't understand why she was accompanying him; this a mission any of them could do in their sleep, and the Winter Soldier is their prize asset. Petrovitch sits her down.

"He's growing unpredictable." he says with his usual bluntness. "If you need to, disable him."

"Of course, _tovarishch_." she nods. 

There is nothing but loyalty within her.

 

The bullet cracks through the air. The Winter Soldier packs his kit up, Natalia studies him. His metal arm hidden beneath a jacket and leather gloves, hair pulled back into a pony tail, face impassive: for once, her orders seem strange. She does not question them, but still she wonders. What has he done to make them wonder for his effectiveness?

He catches her eyes as he finishes disabling the gun, before moving forward to grab her hand. It startles her before, yes, their cover. A young French couple on holiday.

"Do--" he starts, before stopping. His French is impeccable, accent just south of Paris. He seems to struggle to get the words out. "Do you ever think about--" He looks like forcing these words out are causing him some considerable pain.

"Sometimes I dream of a man." he says, suddenly, before stopping. "He looks like the sun."

Natalia's hand slides into her pocket, gripping the knife concealed tightly. His life depends on his next sentence.

"I think I had a life before this." he says, smiling, the first time she's ever seen something genuine pass across his face outside of a laboratory.

The Winter Soldier looks at Natalia's hand, casually inside her pocket. Then he smiles, again. He leans into her, and she thinks he's going to break her neck, so she forces the knife past the leather and into his ribs.

His lips ghost across her forehead. "I think I was in love." he murmurs, and she twists the knife, pushing it further and upwards.

A small sigh falls out of his mouth. It feels like forgiveness.

 

(Natalia Romanova has never sought forgiveness, but now she finds an abundance of it. One day, one day, a thousand years away, Steve Rogers will quietly show her a photograph of Bucky Barnes and tell her of the love of his life. How he fell of a train one cold, dark day in Austria in 1945.

Natasha Romanoff quietly and systematically destroys all evidence that the Winter Soldier ever existed.)

 

(A small footnote in the _Dagens Nyheter_ notes the Stockholm police are interested in a puddle of blood found on the corner of Sveavägen. It may be significant in the assassination of the Prime Minister, or maybe not.)

 

 

 

v. **there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre**.

After Pierce is dead, after Steve has woken up, after a select few try to stitch international security together, a number of high ranking Russian diplomats die; some dodder old men from the Soviet Union, others much younger.

Theoretically, there is nothing to tie them together. Vadim Yevseyev's car crashed into a tree. Arkady Golov hung himself. Stepan Derzhavin is shot by his ex-wife, she confesses.

There are no such things are coincidences to Steve Rogers or Natasha Romanoff, especially when dealing with ex-Red Room KGB members. They end up spending a month in Moscow, staking out high-rise buildings, drinking vodka and pickle, taking turns in kicking down doors to find them just vacated, sometimes with the sheets still warm.

The Winter Soldier, it seems, is tangled between being Yasha and being Bucky. He seems to be reconciling this difference through murdering anyone who was involved in his making. Somewhere between righteousness and vengeance, fire and blood, there's a gun whose been unloaded for the first time since 1945. Steve thinks that some cathartic murder is understandable in the situation.

Natasha has a list, stuck on the wall of their room--it's an old safehouse, S.H.I.E.L.D., rather than KGB, so they should be safe, but that all hangs on the dangerous presumption that it's not HYDRA. They've hedged their bets for two months now. It's a long list, full of names that she recalled, with the help of a few files stolen from a bunker in Kiev.

Vadim Yevseyev. Arkady Golov. Stepan Derzhavin. Twenty-five more. Fifty years of politicians, scientists, sadists. One by one, they disappear.

Konstantin Akinfeev 'jumps' from a building. The list is complete.

Steve and Natasha kick down more doors, interrogate more murderers, gun dealers, drug dealers. They have nothing.

("He's a ghost.")

They're returning from another unsuccessful attempt to squeeze some information from Yelena Belova, who seems to spend her free time these days blackmailing the rich and famous by sleeping with them and then by sleeping with their partners, when they see the door of their apartment has been kicked through. Unconsciously, Steve pulls out his shield and Natasha flicks the safety off her Sig Sauer.

There's no one in the room, but it has been torn apart. The list is torn from the wall, ripped clean in half, the carefully collected newspaper articles and police reports have been slashed with a knife. He's even taken care to smash all the crockery and break the table legs.

Amongst the mindless destruction, there's a note, scribbled on the back of a photograph of Vladimir Putin.

 _перестаньте искать меня_ , it reads, the writer having helpfully--and more shakily--provided an English translation.

 _Stop looking_ , it says, and Steve Rogers shatters.

(There are no more deaths, not a single sighting afterwards.)

 

 

 

_life._

After Zola, the train, the KGB, HYDRA and a thousand murders, someone whispers a name to the Winter Soldier. 

He has always been the asset. He has always been a weapon. 

No one ever gave him a name before. 

Something cracks, and it's like the sunlight touching him for the very first time. 

__Bucky_._

**Author's Note:**

> i. it isn't the storm that makes the ocean dangerous. - a softer world, 911  
> ii. i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) - e.e. cummings  
> iii. maybe i'm meant for the sea - cake bake betty  
> iv. fallaces sunt rerum species et hominum spes fallunt. - is a seneca quote that natasha quotes the first half of in _iron man 2_. it means: The appearances of things are deceptive and the hope of men is deceived.  
>  olaf palme really was assassinated in 1986, and nobody ever really came to a conclusion about who it was.  
> v. there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre - slaughterhouse five, kurt vonnegut


End file.
